One E-Book World?

I’m still following the Frankfurt Book Fair reporting on TV. Tonight there was another mention of the indie publishing phenomenon on aspekte, a well respected cultural magazine program. This mention was shorter and a lot more negative than yesterday’s.

Basically, they compared the challenges facing the publishing industry in the wake of the rise of e-reading to the challenges facing the car industry in the wake of the rise of the hybrid car. Yes, it’s not a comparison I would have made either and frankly I suspect they only made it, so they could show a futuristic exhibition hall sponsored by Audi in the background (the book fair premises are used for all sorts of other events as well, including a big car show. Audi built a dedicated pavilion for the car show and now everybody else hosting anything on the premises is stuck with the thing).

Next, they said that authors publishing their works themselves without the benefit of a publisher was a “nightmare” for publishers. That was all they said about indie publishing, then they started talking about e-book piracy (again in the Audi pavilion – someone must really like that thing) and interviewed a couple of well-known writers, critics and other celebrities, all of whom stated how much they loved print books.

But now enough about Germany. Let’s take a look at the situation around the world. Because while reading and publishing e-books can sometimes be frustrating for those of us outside the US (geo restrictions, Barnes and Noble won’t even talk to us, Amazon won’t do electronic transfers if you don’t have a US bank account, etc…), the situation gets a lot worse if you happen to live outside Amazon‘s fourteen favoured countries.

I have already posted all of the following links on my main blog, but since this stuff is important, it deserves to be linked twice:

Writers from outside the US or UK have always had it more difficult breaking into traditional publishing, even if they write in English, as outlined in this post on my main blog which got quite a bit of attention at the time. The rise of indie publishing should have leveled the playing field for non-Anglo-American writers, so why do Amazon and to a larger degree Barnes and Noble keep up these entry barriers?